Hundreds celebrate opening of Alki plaza

On Saturday, after watching the opening of a new plaza at the Statue of Liberty on Alki, Harald Sund recalled being there in 1952, when the 16-foot replica of New York's statue went up.

He was nine then, and wore a blue Cub Scout uniform, one of a number of scouts who was there.

For many nine-year olds back then -- as well as the ones who were on hand Saturday -- the concept of liberty, much less a statue in her honor, was an obscure one. But Sund remembered that in the cold February afternoon many years ago, the statue seemed to mean something. His mother had come from Norway at 18, and she'd spoken of sailing to Ellis Island, not being able to speak any English, but knowing from photographs what the woman with the torch represented.

In the years since, there'd been Sputnik, the United States flying to the moon, two wars that perhaps were better off not fought, he said, and party telephone lines replaced by cell phones or Bluetooth. In those years, he said, it seemed that America had lost its innocence

But suddenly, Sund was back, watching a ceremony strikingly similar to the one years ago. "It's like a quantum leap back in time," he said. He was surrounded, though, now, by other old former scouts, who'd lost their uniforms, and kerchiefs, and sometimes their hair, who had joined him at Alki to watch these new scouts.

The years have fleshed out the statue's meaning for him, Sund said. After fifty-six more years of life lived and having traveled to seven continents, Sund recalled a saying: Democracy was the worst system of government in the world -- except for all others.

He thought for a moment, when he was asked how life had gone, since he'd stood at attention in 1952.

"It's gone the way it should have," he said.

The roughly 300 people around him who'd crowded into the new brick plaza surrounding the statue signaled how much the statue has come to mean in the more than half century since the Boy Scouts of America put it up.

To not see the statue on Alki, said Mike Bliss, who has lived in West Seattle, for 24 years, would be like "an unlit candle."

Linda Pearson, who has lived in West Seattle since 1995, said it is Alki's meeting place and gathering spot. She and her friends often agree to meet at the Statue of Liberty, before going for breakfast.

When the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11, it was the statue where she and hundreds of others -- spontaneously and instinctively gathered -- gathered to mourn, and leave flowers and World Trade Center snow globes. "It's one of those things, like knowing where you were when JFK was assassinated," she said. "I remember on 9/11 I came to the statue."

Despite all that, it's taken its blows over the years. It was knocked off its base in 1975. On April Fools' Day in 1996, someone ripped off the torch.

Then in 2005, someone climbed the statue and ripped off the seven rays radiating from her crown. After that incident, a different community group, the Northwest Programs for the Arts, raised money to recast the copper statue in bronze. In 2007, after Alki had suffered the unlit candle Bliss described, the statue was returned to the beach. But although Seattle's parks department was fine to just let things be, others wanted more.

Paul and Libby Carr had met in 1992 at a picnic by the statue. The couple wanted to protect the statue with a taller, thinner base that could not be so easily climbed and destroyed. They also wanted a larger plaza, made of bricks inscribed with the names and messages from donors.

.The Carrs and other volunteers asked the community for money to build a better home for the statue. The community responded with $176,000, including $50,000 from the city. The statue was removed again this summer while the brick plaza was being built, and it was returned only on Thursday.

On Saturday, Pearson knelt and made an imprint of her brick on a piece of paper. "From sea to shining sea," it said.

The Carrs stood on a makeshift stage and Libby Carr said France had given the United States the original Statue of Liberty. The Boy Scouts had given Alki this replica, as part of a national campaign to erect lady liberties around the country. Libby Carr said of the effort, "It was all paying it forward for me."

One of the scouts watching this time was 8-year-old Manny DeLeon. During a recording of a CD that was being compiled for a time capsule to be buried near the statue, the boy was asked what liberty meant to him. "It means being able to do what I want and not being told, 'Do this. Do that.' " DeLeon said, the years bound to flesh out his answer, as it has for Sund.